The present invention relates to computer software, and in particular, to a method and system for data processing using multidimensional filtering.
Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Generally, there are numerous methods used to model large collections of data (e.g., data warehouses). One particular approach is to model data according to a star schema. Typically, a star schema includes one or more fact tables, and one or more dimension tables associated with one of the fact tables. A fact table may be configured to include information (i.e., facts) that describes virtually anything desired. A dimension table may further describe a fact in a fact table. For example, a fact table of sales transactions may include facts like the purchasing customer, the item purchased, the quantity purchased, and when the purchase was made. A dimension table associated with this fact table may include information about the purchasing customer (e.g. name, address, telephone number). Another dimension table associated with this fact table may include information about the when the item was purchased (e.g., time, day, month, year). Thus, fact tables and dimension tables may be defined to include all types of information.
With large collections of data, including collections of data modeled based on a star schema, it may be desirable to filter the collection of data based on some predefined criteria to produce a subset of data that includes data that meets the predefined criteria. Accordingly, filtering the data may be a resource intensive process due to the amount of data being filtered and the type of criteria defined. In particular, filtering data based on multiple dimension tables (i.e., use of a multidimensional filter) may cause heavy use of resources and long wait times in producing the results.
Thus, there is a need for improved techniques for data processing using multidimensional filtering. The present invention solves these and other problems by providing a method and system for data processing using multidimensional filtering.